Читать книгу Buried Cities and Bible Countries - George St. Clair - Страница 16

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It is justly remarked by Rev. Greville J. Chester that there is scarcely a better or more striking commentary upon the prophets of Israel than the present condition of the ancient Biblical cities of Lower Egypt. For information regarding these cities—or what remains of them, buried in the soil—we are largely indebted to the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was founded in 1883, for the purpose of promoting historical investigation in Egypt, by means of systematically conducted explorations. Particular attention is given to sites which may be expected to throw light upon obscure questions of history and topography, such as those connected with the mysterious Hyksos period (the period of the Shepherd Kings), the district of the Hebrew Sojourn, the route of the Exodus, and the early sources of Greek art. Explorers have been sent out every season, and each year has been fruitful in discoveries. The objects of antiquity discovered are first submitted to the Director and Conservators of the National Egyptian Museum; and those which can be spared are divided between the British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, U.S.A.

Excavations at San.—San, in the north-eastern part of the Delta, is the Tanis of the Septuagint and the Greek historians, and the Zoan of the Bible. At the time of the Exodus Zoan was the capital of Egypt, and the Pharaoh resided there. The wonders wrought by Moses and Aaron are referred to by the Psalmist as having been manifested in the field of Zoan (Psalm lxxviii. 43). We are told that Hebron was built only seven years before Zoan (Num. xiii. 22), and therefore, since Hebron was flourishing in Abraham’s time, Zoan also must have been a very ancient city.

The modern village of San is a small collection of mud hovels, situated on the banks of a canal, which was once the Tanitic branch of the Nile. Near the village there are huge mounds which contain a ruined temple and other ancient remains. The place has been to a large extent explored by Mr W. M. Flinders Petrie, and the Memoir containing his interesting results is published by the Egypt Exploration Fund.

Rameses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, seems to have fixed upon Zoan and made it a new capital, because by its position it commanded the northern route to Syria and placed the king, after the conquest of that country, in easy communication with all his dominions. It was also close to the very centre of the Hyksos rule, which was only lately ended.

The Hyksos were the so-called Shepherd Kings, who appear to have come from the Arabian desert, or perhaps beyond, and established themselves in Lower Egypt at a period when native rule was weak. “The monuments of the Hyksos are among the most curious in Egypt; and it is to San that we owe the greater number of those brought to light. They are all distinguished by an entirely different type of face from any that can be found on other Egyptian monuments, a type which cannot be attributed to any other known period; and it is therefore all the more certain that they belong to the foreign race. Another peculiarity is that they are without exception executed in black or grey granite. The Hyksos only held the Delta, and occasionally more or less of Middle Egypt, and so they had no command of the red granite quarries of Assouan, which remained in the power of the native rulers. Whether the black granite came from Sinai or from the Hammamat district is not certain.” Mr F. Ll. Griffith, the coadjutor of Mr Flinders Petrie, mentions several interesting monuments of a kind peculiar to this people. One is a group of two men, with bushy plaited hair and long beards: they stand with a tray of offerings in front of them, on which lie fishes, with papyrus plants hanging round. The details are beautifully worked, the flowers and buds being most delicately wrought. The black granite sphinxes made by the Hyksos have been often described. They have the flat, massive, muscular, lowering face, with short whiskers and beard around it, the lips being shaven; and the hair is in a mat of thick, short locks descending over the whole chest, a style copied from the great sphinxes of the twelfth dynasty. It is a curious fact that the inscriptions on Hyksos sphinxes, &c., are always in a line down the right shoulder, never on the left. Mr Petrie suggests that this honouring of the right shoulder by this Semitic people is analogous to the particular offering of the right shoulder continually enjoined in the Jewish law.[7] The Egyptians missed this idea, and inscribed either side indifferently, showing no preference for the left, although that was their side of honour.

Here at San, or Tanis, was discovered the famous Stone of San or Decree of Canopus, which is now preserved in the National Museum of Egypt. It bears the text of a decree made by the priests of Egypt, assembled at Canopus (which was at that time the religious capital of the country) in the ninth year of Ptolemy Euergetes (B.C. 254). It ordains the deification of Berenice, a daughter of Ptolemy’s just dead, and creates a fifth order of priests, to be called Euergetæ, for the better paying of divine honours to the king and queen. The chief value of the monument consists in the circumstance that the inscription is tri-lingual, the characters being hieroglyphic (sacred), demotic (those of everyday business), and Greek (the chief language of foreigners in Egypt); so that, like the Rosetta Stone, it is of great use in helping scholars to decipher the Egyptian monuments. There is a plaster cast of this stone in the British Museum.

Mr Griffith finds that the early monuments of Tanis are suggestive of having been brought by Rameses II. to adorn his new capital. The truth about the age of Tanis can only be ascertained when deep excavations are made in the mound itself, or a sufficient examination of the extensive cemeteries has been carried out. But while the explorer is waiting, the cemeteries are in danger of being worked out by the Arabs, and the tombs are being destroyed for the sake of amulets to sell to dealers and travellers.

Tell Nebesheh—About eight miles S.E. of Tanis (modern San) is the low mound of Tell Nebesheh, originally known as Tell Farun—i.e., the mound of Pharaoh, because of the great monolith shrine called Ras Farun, or Pharaoh’s Head. Here Mr Petrie found, among other things, the remains of a temple, the altar of which contained important inscriptions. They were engraved by a certain “chief of the chancellors and royal seal-bearer,” whose name and further titles are effaced. This person was one of a series of officials whose titles were singularly parallel to the English Lord High Chancellor and Lord Privy Seal. The altar appears to belong to the Hyksos period, and it is suggested by Mr Petrie that these officials—who were so powerful that one of them actually appropriated for his inscriptions the royal monuments in a public temple—were native Egyptians, the Hyksos conquerors being only a military horde, without much civil organization, or organizing capacity, and taking over as they found it the native bureaucracy, who managed all the details of the needful administration of the country. So there appears to have been a series of viziers, men who acted for the king over the treasury and taxes, and over the royal decrees and public documents, bearing the king’s seal.

After some further discussion of the position and importance of these viziers, Mr Petrie says that yet one further document may be quoted as giving and receiving light on this question: the account of Joseph in the Book of Genesis undoubtedly refers to the Hyksos period, and there we read, “Let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt”—not, let Pharaoh give orders to his own officers. “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph.... Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou. And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh took off his signet-ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him, ‘Abrech;’ and he set him over all the land of Egypt.” Here we read of the investiture of a vizier under the Hyksos, creating him royal seal-bearer, and giving him the honour of the second chariot. This we now see was not an extraordinary act of an autocrat, but the filling up of a regular office of the head of the native administration.

Excavations at Tell Basta, the ancient Bubastis. A little to the south of Zagazig, Mr Naville and Mr Griffith have made important discoveries. Bubastis was the seat of the worship of Bast or Pasht, the cat-headed goddess, whose temple is described by Herodotus as the most beautiful in Egypt. It was surrounded, he tells us, by a low wall, having figures engraved upon it. Here, accordingly, in April 1887, our explorers began their work, in the rectangular depression surrounded on all sides by the mounds of houses, which must have been higher than the temple. In a short time they disclosed the site of a grand hypostyle hall, strewn with fallen monolithic columns of twelfth dynasty workmanship, and a hall without columns, but lined, as it should seem, with elaborate bas-relief sculptures representing a great religious ceremony, and containing tens of thousands of minutely-executed hieroglyphic inscriptions. The columns and the architraves of the hypostyle hall, though of an earlier period, are emblazoned with the ovals of Rameses II. (nineteenth dynasty). The inscriptions of the festival hall commemorate Osorkon II., of the twenty-second dynasty, and his Queen Karoama. Besides the two historical landmarks thus determined, various blocks bearing the names of Usertesen III. and Pepi Merira testified to the existence of the edifice not only in the days of the first great Theban Empire, but in the very remote age of the Pyramid kings of the sixth dynasty. At the same time a small tentative excavation at the western extremity of the site yielded the name and titles of Nectanebo I., of the thirtieth and last native dynasty. Such being the outcome of but four weeks’ labour at the close of the season, it seemed reasonable to hope for important results when the excavations should be resumed. This hope was more than fulfilled in 1888. As the work in this instance was not carried on in the desert, but quite near to a busy railway station, many travellers visited the place. The scene was curiously picturesque. “Here, grouped together on the verge of the great cemetery of Sacred Cats, are the tents of the officers of the Fund; yonder, swarming like bees at the bottom of the huge crater-like depression which marks the area of the temple, are seen some three to four hundred labourers—diggers in the trenches and pits, basket-carriers clearing away the soil as it is thrown out, overseers to keep the diggers at work, ‘pathway-men’ to keep the paths open and the carriers moving, gangs of brawny ‘Shayalîn,’ or native porters, harnessed together by stout ropes, and hauling or turning sculptured blocks which have not seen the light for many centuries; girls with bowls of water and sponges, to wash down the carved surfaces preparatory to the process of taking paper ‘squeezes;’ and small boys to run errands, help with the measuring tapes, and keep guard over the tents and baggage. With so many hands at work and so many overseers to keep them going, it is not wonderful that the excavations make rapid progress. The two large pits which were opened last season are now thrown into one, and are being enlarged from east to west, following the axis of the structure. The sides are also being cleared, and before another month shall have expired the whole temple—of which, apparently, not one stone remains upon another—will be visible from end to end. Its entire length is probably about 700 or 800 feet; but measurements, of course, are as yet purely conjectural.”

Among the discoveries at this second exploration was a third hall, dating from the reign of Osorkon I., the walls of which were sculptured with bas-reliefs on a large scale, representing the king in the act of worshipping Bast and the other deities of the city. It appears that one great divinity honoured here was Amon; and another was the god Set.

It had not been suspected that Bubastis was the site of an important Hyksos settlement; but from the type of the statues and other things which have been found, that turns out to have been the case.

The chronographers have preserved the names of several of the Hyksos kings, recording them as follows:—Silites (or Salatis), Beon, Apachnas, Tannas (or Tanras), Asseth, and Apophis (in Egyptian, Apepi). Mariette, in his very successful excavations at Tanis, found the name of Apepi written on the arm of a statue, although the statue was of older date. Mr Naville has found, at Tell Basta, a colossal statue which he takes to be the statue of Apepi. It is now in the British Museum. This is particularly interesting, because Syncellus relates that Apepi was the king in whose reign Joseph rose to the high position described in Genesis. One remarkable object found at Tell Basta is part of a seated statue, upon which the royal name reads “Ian-Ra,” or “Ra-Ian.” The name is new to us, but when Mr Naville went over to Boulak, where the Museum of Antiquities then was, and showed a copy to Ahmed Kemal-ed-Deen Effendi, the learned Mohammedan official, he exclaimed at once—“You have found the Pharaoh of Joseph. All our Arab books call him Reiyan, the son of El Welid.” European scholars do not place absolute reliance on Arab chronicles, which are often fanciful; yet it is remarkable that the statue of Ian-Ra, Joseph’s king, according to the Arabs, should be found at Tell Basta, in close proximity to the statue of Apepi, Joseph’s king, according to Syncellus. Mr Naville distinguishes Ian-Ra from Apepi, and thinks he is the same as Ianias or Annas, mentioned by Josephus as the fifth king out of six. Mr Naville has also found at Tell Basta the names of twenty-five Pharaohs who were known already, including Cheops and Chephren, the builders of the pyramids, about 3700 B.C.

That Joseph served a Hyksos king has long been accepted by the majority of Egyptologists as a very probable hypothesis, both chronologically and from the internal evidence of the Biblical narrative. The Arab writers represent the Hyksos as Amalekites of Midian. Mr Naville agrees with those who think they came from Mesopotamia, and already possessed a high degree of civilisation and culture.

Bubastis seems to have been a favourite place of residence with the Shepherd Kings; and thus Joseph would be but a short distance from his brethren in the land of Goshen, where they looked after the king’s herds of cattle.

Saft-el-Henneh or Goshen.—In more than one season Mr Naville carried on operations to discover the locality of Goshen, which had always been matter of conjecture and controversy. He has come to the conclusion that Goshen was a city a little to the east of the modern Zagazig, and situated in a district of the same name. The land of Goshen may be described as a district roughly triangular in shape, with its apex to the south; having Zagazig at its north-west angle, Tel-el-Kebir north-east, and Belbeis at the lower extremity. The town of Goshen appears to have been at Saft-el-Henneh, nearly half-way between the eastern and western points of the triangle. Here we find the name Tel Fakûs, the Phakusa of the Greeks, and apparently the same as Kesem, Gesem, or Goshen. Saft-el-Henneh itself is a large village, standing in the midst of a country peculiarly fruitful, corresponding thus to “the best of the land,” which was given to the Israelites.

“At the first glance,” says Mr Naville, “one sees that Saft-el-Henneh stands on the site of an ancient city of considerable extent. The whole village is constructed on the ruins of old houses, many of which are still to be seen on the south side.”

The monuments discovered at Saft include a colossal statue, in black granite, of Rameses II., which, probably, belonged to a temple of some importance; and a shrine of Nectanebo II., with a dedicatory hymn, and the information that the place where the shrine was erected was called Kes.

The Book of Genesis tells us that Goshen was a pasture land. We may thence infer that it was not thickly inhabited, and not yet organized into a province with its capital, its temples, its priests, and its governor. Since then the name is absent from the earliest Egyptian lists of provinces—namely, those of Seti I. and Rameses II. (the Pharaoh that oppressed Israel)—Mr Naville maintains that the hieroglyphic records which simply omit the name, and the Bible narrative which incidentally shows us the reason why, are remarkably in accord.

Heliopolis.—No excavations have yet been undertaken at Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, which is situated some nine miles from Cairo in a north-easterly direction. It was a very ancient city, of great celebrity as a seat of the worship of the sun god Ra, whose symbol in the form of the living bull Mnevis, was there kept and cared for and reverenced. In the Bible the city is called On or Beth Shemesh. Joseph probably served Potiphar in this city; and Pharaoh afterwards gave him to wife Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, a priest of On. There can be little doubt, either, that Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, was educated at this seat of learning. We must believe, therefore, that he often looked upon the six obelisks which stood in front of the temple of Ra—one of which remains to this day—for they had been erected centuries before his birth. Four of them were set up by Thothmes III. and his family, about 1600 years before the Christian era, and the other two by Usertesen I. upwards of 3000 years B.C. Two of the Thothmes obelisks were at a later period transferred to Alexandria, to adorn the approach of a magnificent temple erected in honour of the Cæsars; and it is one of these two which has become known as Cleopatra’s Needle and now stands on the Thames Embankment. The one obelisk which remains at Heliopolis is the oldest object of the kind in the world.

Scarcely anything is now to be seen of the city itself. It no doubt served as a handy quarry to the builders of Cairo; but since the surviving obelisk is buried 3 or 4 feet in Nile mud, it is not improbable that many small objects of antiquarian interest are buried also. Moreover, the sides of the vast enclosure in which the temple was situated are still marked by mounds or walls of crude brick, and these, on the north side, have their continuation in the ruins of the ancient town. Here are frequently found scarabæi or images of the sacred beetle, with other sacred images, emblems in porcelain, and other antiquities, so that apparently the place would repay a systematic search.

Tell Defenneh, the Biblical Tahpanhes.—In June 1886 Mr Flinders Petrie had the felicity to discover “Pharaoh’s House,” to which Jeremiah was brought, after the calamities in Judea, and where he hid the great stones, as a symbolical act, in the mortar of the brickwork. It lies in the sandy desert bordering on Lake Menzaleh, about two days’ journey from San, some hours distant on the one hand from the cultivated Delta, and on the other hand from the Suez Canal. Here in the midst of the plain are the brick ruins of a large building; and on the first evening of his arrival in the district Mr Petrie heard to his surprise that the building was known as the Kasr el Bint el Yehudi, or the Palace of the Jew’s daughter. Obviously this might refer to the daughter of King Zedekiah who accompanied Jeremiah in his exile; and there could now be no doubt that Defenneh represented the ancient Daphnai and Tahpanhes. It was a frontier fortress or advanced post, to guard the great highway into Syria.

By the associations of Tahpanhes we are at once carried to Scripture. “The children of Noph and Tahpanhes have broken the crown of thy head” (Jer. ii. 16). This was after the slaying of Josiah, the deposition of Jehoahaz, the setting up of the tributary Jehoiakim, and the removal of Jehoahaz into Egypt—events which marked the first period of intercourse between Jews and Greeks. “This intercourse, however, was soon to be increased; three years later, Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judea, and all who fled from the war would arrive at Tahpanhes in their flight into Egypt, and most likely stop there. In short, during all the troubles and continual invasions and sieges of Jerusalem, in B.C. 607, B.C. 603, and B.C. 599 (in which a wholesale deportation of the people took place), and, above all, in the final long siege and destruction of 590–588 B.C., when “the city was broken up,” and all the men of war fled, every one who sought to avoid the miseries of war, or who was politically obnoxious, would naturally flee down into Egypt. Such refugees would necessarily reach the frontier fort on the caravan road, and would there find a mixed and mainly foreign population, Greek, Phœnician, and Egyptian, among whom their presence would not be resented, as it would be by the still strictly protectionist Egyptians further in the country. That they should largely, or perhaps mainly settle there would be the most natural course; they would be tolerated, they would find a constant communication with their own countrymen, and they would be as near to Judea as they could in safety remain, while they awaited a chance of returning.

“The last and greatest migration to Tahpanhes is that fully recorded by Jeremiah, which gives us the pattern of what doubtless had been going on long before. After Nebuchadnezzar had retired with his spoils, Gedaliah, the governor whom he set up, was quickly slain, the country fell into anarchy, and all the responsible inhabitants who were left fled into Egypt to avoid the vengeance of Nebuchadnezzar. ‘Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the forces, took all the remnant of Judah, that were returned (from all nations, whither they had been driven), to sojourn in the land of Judah; the men, and the women, and the children, and the king’s daughters [Zedekiah’s], and every person that Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, had left with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Jeremiah the prophet, and Baruch the son of Neriah; and they came into the land of Egypt; for they obeyed not the voice of the Lord: and they came even to Tahpanhes’ (Jer. xliii. 5–7).” This migration was undertaken in spite of the warnings of Jeremiah.

Pharaoh Hophra, the reigning monarch in Egypt, had been an ally of King Zedekiah’s, and so he placed at the disposal of his friend’s daughter the palace in this frontier fortress of Tahpanhes, which had been a royal residence sometimes. Here we may suppose the fugitives would have been comparatively contented, and thought themselves safe, only that Jeremiah vehemently prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar would come and destroy the place. This, according to Josephus, he did—“He fell upon Egypt, ... and took those Jews that were there captives, and led them away to Babylon; and such was the end of the nation of the Hebrews” (Ant. ix. 7). Josephus is not always believed, and it has even been denied in recent years that Nebuchadnezzar was ever in Egypt at all. But a recently discovered inscription tells us that he was in the country, and penetrated as far south as Assouan;[8] and now at last Mr Petrie discovers the palace to have been plundered, dismantled, and burnt, apparently in fulfilment of Jeremiah’s prediction.

The existing remains of Tahpanhes are extensive, and show that the ancient city was a large one. Under the corners of the chief buildings were found plaques of metal and of stone, engraved with the cartouche of Psammetichus I.; and under the south-east corner the teeth and bones of an ox, sacrificed at the ceremony when the building was founded. Among the antiquities found are beautiful painted Greek vases, plaques, &c., of gold, silver, lead, and copper, articles of carnelian, jaspar, and lapis lazuli.

A most interesting thing is the finding of the brickwork or pavement spoken of in Jeremiah xliii. 8. “Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah in Tahpanhes, saying, Take great stones in thine hand, and hide them in mortar in the brickwork which is at the entry of Pharaoh’s house in Tahpanhes, in the sight of the men of Judah; and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Behold I will send and take Nebuchadnezzar the King of Babylon, my servant, and will set his throne upon these stones that I have hid; and he shall spread his royal pavilion over them, &c.” This brickwork or pavement at the entry of Pharaoh’s house has always been misunderstood, and served as a puzzle to translators. “But” (says Mr Petrie) “as soon as the plan of the palace began to be recovered, the exactness of the description was manifest. On the north-west of the fort was a great open air platform of brickwork, such as is now seen outside all great houses, and most small ones, in Egypt. A space is reserved outside the door, generally along the side of the house, covered with hard beaten mud, edged with a ridge of bricks if not much raised from the ground, and kept swept clean. On this platform the inhabitants sit when they wish to converse with their neighbours or the passers-by. A great man will settle himself to receive his friends and drink coffee, and public business is generally transacted there. Such seems to have been the object of this large platform—a place to meet persons who would not be admitted to the palace or fort, to assemble guards, to hold large levées, to receive tribute and stores, to unlade goods, and to transact the multifarious business which in such a climate is best done in the open air. At the same time the actual way into the palace was along a raised causeway which rose at the back of this platform.

“This platform” (continues Mr Petrie) “is therefore unmistakably ‘the brickwork or pavement which is at the entry of Pharaoh’s house in Tahpanhes.’ Here the ceremony described by Jeremiah took place before the chiefs of the fugitives assembled on the platform, and here Nebuchadnezzar ‘spread his royal pavilion.’ The very nature of the site is precisely applicable to all the events. Unhappily, the great denudation which has gone on has swept away most of this platform, and we could not expect to find the stones whose hiding is described by Jeremiah.”

Another discovery, made some years ago, looks like evidence that Nebuchadnezzar actually came to Tahpanhes. A native sold to the Boulak Museum three cylinders of terra cotta, such as would be used for foundation memorials, the text on them being an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar’s referring to his constructions in Babylon. These cylinders were said to come from the Isthmus of Suez, but it is strongly suspected that they were found at Defenneh, after the platform had become denuded.

Tell-el-Yahoudeh, the Mound of the Jew.—This place should be interesting to us, if only from the fact that a temple was built here, which some have fancied would be the counterpart of the Temple at Jerusalem. If any considerable remains of the temple can be found, they may assist materially the right understanding of the descriptions which have come down to us of the more important structure on Mount Moriah.

Tell-el-Yahoudeh is about twenty miles from Cairo, on the way to Ismailia, near the Moslem village of Shibeen-el-Kanater, and is supposed to be the city of Onias. Josephus tells us that at the time of the conquest of Judea by Antiochus Epiphanes, Onias, son of the high priest, fled from the persecution, and took refuge in Egypt (B. C. 182). Onias, feeling encouraged by a prophecy of Isaiah’s that a time should come when there would be “an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt” (Isaiah xix. 19), begged the Egyptian king, Ptolemy Philometor, to grant him permission to build a temple, on the site of a deserted shrine or fortress. The request was granted, and Onias built a small city, after the model of Jerusalem, and a temple, after the pattern of the temple of Solomon.

The mound now existing measures about half a mile from east to west, and a quarter of a mile from north to south, and has the appearance of a fortress. It has been more or less ransacked at various times; but would probably still repay a thorough exploration. In the absence of a full investigation there remains a little doubt about the genuineness of the site; but Professor Sayce, on one occasion, found here a fragment of stone, bearing two ancient Hebrew letters; and the decisive proof that it was a Jewish settlement has been furnished by the discovery of a Jewish cemetery, about one mile further east in the desert. The ground there, for the length of more than half a mile, is quite honeycombed with tombs. Here and there a body was found in situ, and there were no traces of embalming, nor any ornament of any kind, but invariably a brick under the head, which was a distinctive mark of Jewish burials. A few tablets had escaped the general destruction, and the names which they contained fully confirmed the conclusion suggested by the mode of burial: “Eleazar” was one name and is purely Jewish: some others were Jewish with a Greek ending, as Salamis, Nethaneus, Barchias; and others still were Greek names of frequent use among the Jews, as Aristobulos, Onesimas, Tryphania.

Tell-el-Maskhuta or Pithom-Succoth.—The Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites appears to have been Rameses II., son of Seti I., of the nineteenth dynasty. This dynasty only began with Rameses I., the grandfather of Rameses II. The store cities built by the Israelites were called Raamses and Pithom; and when the Exodus took place the starting point was Rameses and the first resting-place Succoth (Ex. i. 11; xii. 37). None of these places were known, and it had hardly been suspected that Pithom and Succoth were so closely associated as they are now found to be. But the site of Pithom has lately been discovered. We all remember Kassassin, where Sir Garnet Wolseley halted the British troops, in the campaign of 1882, just before that silent midnight march to storm Arabi’s entrenchments. It is twelve miles west of Ismailia on the Suez Canal. Close by Kassassin is a low mound called Tell-el-Maskhuta, the Mound of the Statue. Here, at the end of the last century, was found a red granite monolith, representing Rameses II. sitting between the two solar gods Ra and Tum. In 1860 M. Paponot’s men came across another monolith, and it is probable that the pair stood symmetrically at the entrance of some edifice. Further excavation brought to light two sphinxes in black granite, placed also on each side of the avenue; and then, farther on, a shrine or naos in red sandstone, and a large stele in red granite, lying flat. All these monuments had been dedicated to the god Tum.

The excavations recently made by M. Edouard Naville, of Geneva, are described in his Memoir written for the Egypt Exploration Fund, from which Memoir we glean the following interesting information. The city was called Pi Tum, which means the house or abode of Tum (the god of the setting sun), and the surrounding district was called Thuku or Thukut, which is equivalent to Succoth. It is a mere philological accident that the Hebrew language has a word succoth, signifying tents. The inscriptions appear to show that it was Rameses II. who caused the city to be built; and in this they do but confirm the view previously entertained by Egyptologists. Pithom was both a store city and a fortress, and so was surrounded by very thick walls, part of which are yet preserved. The civil city of Thuku extended all round the sacred buildings of Pithom. We have first of all a square area enclosed by enormous brick walls, the space within being equal to 55,000 square yards. In the south-west angle is a small temple. The wall enclosure is honeycombed with rectangular chambers, well built, the bricks being of Nile mud, and united by mortar. It is a curious fact that some of the bricks contain straw, while others are without. These chambers M. Naville believes to be the granaries into which Pharaoh gathered the provisions necessary for armies about to cross the desert, and perhaps for caravans and travellers, who were on the road to Syria.

Pithom, according to the Coptic version of the Scriptures, was the place where Joseph went up to meet Jacob—“near Pithom, the city in the land of Rameses” (Gen. xlvi. 28). It is true that the LXX., supported by Josephus, make Heroopolis to be the meeting-place; but it is not unlikely that Heroopolis was a later name for Pithom itself. The Greeks were succeeded by the Romans, traces of whose habitations are to be seen on all sides.

When the Romans levelled the ground for their camp, they destroyed without mercy an immense number of inscriptions, which would have been most precious to us now. Of those which remain, by far the most important is the great tablet of Philadelphus, measuring 4 feet 3 inches, by 3 feet 2 inches, which was found near the naos. It is stated in the inscription that the king ordered it to be erected before his father Tum, the great god of Succoth. It records what was done for Pithom by the king, and his queen and sister Arsinoe. We learn from it that Pithom and the neighbouring city of Arsinoe, which the king founded in honour of his sister, were the starting points of commercial expeditions to the Red Sea; and that from thence one of Ptolemy’s generals went to the land of the Troglodytes, and founded the city of Ptolemais Θηριῶν, for the special purpose of facilitating the chase of elephants. And it was to Heroopolis that the ships brought the animals (so that if Heroopolis was Pithom, and Pithom was Maskhuta, the navigable water must have extended farther northward than it does at present). We learn also that close to Pithom there was a city called Pikerehat, or Pikeheret, apparently the Pi-ha-hiroth mentioned in the narrative of the Exodus.

It was suggested by the late Dr Birch that the Israelites, besides building store cities, were compelled, like convicts or captives of war, to labour on the forts of Tanis, and on the line of the great wall which protected Egypt on the north-east. This long wall extended from Pelusium southwards, and had been built to keep out the tribes of the desert and other invaders from the Asiatic side. From the “Adventures of Sinuhit,” a narrative dating from the twelfth dynasty, it appears to have been of very early construction; for the fugitive there says, “I reached the walls of the prince, which he has constructed to repel the Sittiu and to destroy the Nomiu-Shaiu; I remained in a crouching posture among the bushes, for fear of being seen by the guard, relieved each day, which keeps watch from the summit of the fortress: I proceeded on my way at nightfall.”[9] The wall appears to have been renovated by Seti I. and Rameses II., and strengthened by forts, built after the Canaanite models which the Pharaohs had seen in the course of their campaigns. The Egyptians, not content with appropriating the thing, appropriated also the name, and called these frontier towers by the Semitic name of Magdilu or Migdols. In a later reign, an officer who had been sent to recapture two runaway slaves, reports that he did not overtake them until he had got beyond the region of the wall, to the north of the Migdol of King Seti Menephtah.[10]

[Authorities and Sources:—“Biblical Sites in Lower Egypt.” By Greville J. Chester, B.A., in the Survey Memoirs, P. E. Fund. “Tel-el-Yahoudeh.” By Prof. T. Hayter Lewis, F.S.A., in Trans. Soc. Bib. Archæol., vol. vii. “The Store-City of Pithom.” By M. Naville, Egypt Exploration Fund. “Goshen.” By M. Naville, E. E. Fund. “Daphnae.” By W. M. Flinders Petrie, E. E. Fund. “Tanis.” By W. M. Flinders Petrie, E. E. Fund. Murray’s Handbook, “Egypt.”]